Talk Dirty to Me: Inside Hollywoods Audio Erotica Craze
“You deserve to be loved and thoroughly ruined” is not necessarily something The Summer I Turned Pretty fans would expect to hear the show’s star Chris Briney tell them. But in a world where celebs can inspire parasocial relationships and fan fiction, the 27-year-old actor and other hot stars are giving voice to such fantasies….
“You deserve to be loved and thoroughly ruined” is not necessarily something The Summer I Turned Pretty fans would expect to hear the show’s star Chris Briney tell them. But in a world where celebs can inspire parasocial relationships and fan fiction, the 27-year-old actor and other hot stars are giving voice to such fantasies.
Briney, Andrew Scott, Manny Jacinto, Tom Blyth, Jamie Campbell Bower, Victoria Pedretti, Jesse Williams, Lucien Laviscount, Thomas Doherty and Katherine Moennig are among the actors who have sultrily lent their voices to original audio erotica stories on the app Quinn.
Described as being “made by women, for the world,” Quinn was designed to help listeners be a main character in their fantasy, with stories putting female pleasure at the forefront. Now, the app has recruited Hollywood stars.
Amid a growing demand for romance content, the collaborations offer all the titillation of a traditional bodice ripper with the extra spice of having a well-known voice spin sexual scenarios directly into your ear, with lines like, “I wanted her to strip me, straddle me, lay me bare,” “Can you open your legs for me?” and “That’s my good girl.”
Quinn founder Caroline Spiegel
Ari Michelson/Courtesy of Subject
Quinn founder Caroline Spiegel — sister of Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel — launched the app in 2021 and began enlisting Hollywood talent last year. The first recruit was Scott, aka Hot Priest from Fleabag. “They sort of started to really be a key marketing initiative for us,” Spiegel tells The Hollywood Reporter of the strategy. “I think it’s been just so much more impactful that we could have realized.”
Audio erotica proved to be impactful too for Spiegel, who after feeling like nothing was “made for women with women in mind” discovered the audio erotica landscape after her personal journey with an eating disorder, experiencing a loss of libido and struggling to feel “connected” to her body. “Visual erotic content made me feel more disconnected,” she explains. But after hearing audio erotica on “niche internet communities” like on Reddit or Tumblr, Spiegel says the difference was notable.
“It was rooted in storytelling and imagination, and it didn’t trigger comparison. That shift was meaningful for me, and it ultimately led to starting Quinn. If audio could do that for me, I thought many others might be looking for the same thing,” she says.
After deciding to cultivate her own solution for the loss of desire with Quinn, Spiegel learned that pitching the idea to investors at the time proved to be a guessing game.
“I have found that you can really never judge a book by its cover in this realm. I would go into meetings with certain investors who had a reputation of being cool young investors, and they would be totally prudish and put off by Quinn,” she recalls. “Then I would go talk to some older, more buttoned up people, and they would totally get it and vice versa. So, you can’t anticipate what people’s relationship to sex and shame is.”
Andrew Scott narrates The Queen’s Guard.
Courtesy of Quinn
Having raised $13.5 million from venture capital firms and launching in 2021, the app now has “hundreds of thousands of subscribers,” she says, 80 percent between the ages of 24 and 30.
While there are numerous platforms and approaches for audio erotica, Quinn is composed of entirely creator-driven content with a Spotify-like model of letting users follow favorite creators and offering curated recommendations. Adding collaborations with stars has given it mainstream appeal.
Says Spiegel: “It’s storytelling without a prescriptive visual. It’s very freeing. For sexually explicit content, it’s really important because sexy looks different to everyone.” The intent of enlisting Hollywood talent was to offer a way to share audio erotica that “felt approachable and not intimidating.”
In each of the stories, the actor directly addresses the listener, who is thereby cast as the main character and sex-scene partner. Stories can vary from a sapphic spy drama to a medieval romance to a passionate tryst on the beach.
Quinn tends to pitch to stars “with a large, engaged female fan base.” Topping app listeners’ wish list for narrators, according to user feedback? Pedro Pascal, Dev Patel, Matthew Gray Gubler and Jensen Ackles. The most successful narrators thus far have been Briney, Williams and Bower, says Spiegel.
With a growing roster of celebrity narrators, Spiegel says getting top talent to say yes is still an uphill battle. “Around 50 percent of our pitches get entertained. But we are improving that every day,” Spiegel adds. “I would say people either get the message or they don’t.”
Deals can take anywhere from a week to months to iron out, depending on the star and their level of involvement. Spiegel says they “pay talent at competitive rates, and compensation varies based on the actor, the scope of the project and the amount of time they’ll spend in the studio.”
Performers will be offered various options on scripts, which are penned by the app’s small in-house writing team, with contributions by a broader network of freelance scriptwriters.For each original, a writer who can “bring the right tone and world to life” is chosen for the project. “We find writers from everywhere — independent authors, screenwriters interested in audio, audio drama writers, and more,” Spiegel says.
Quinn’s creators screen
“They’ll choose what script feels best to them. A lot of them kind of become co-creators,” Spiegel says of collaborating with stars.“I think, generally, I’ve found that screen actors really like audio narration —they don’t have to worry about hair and makeup, blocking, etc. and can really focus on the story.”
The recording process lasts from eight to 12 hours. Just as with films and TV, stars can work with an intimacy coordinator, who in this case is focused on “supporting the breath” for moans and heavy breathing.
In one of Quinn’s behind-the-scenes videos, Gilded Age star Blyth recalled getting the offer: “My first thought was, ‘This is different.’ And then I read it, and I got it. There’s something bold about telling a story this intimate entirely through sound.”
Bower (Stranger Things) described his own narration as feeling like “fan fiction coming to life a bit more.” Meanwhile, Jacinto (Freakier Friday) joked that though he was up for the challenge of taking on this type of project, he didn’t want his parents to listen to it.
“At first, we weren’t even sure if people would do it or people would like it,” Spiegel says. But in an AI-driven age, when a Hollywood heartthrob’s voice can be deepfaked into any number of compromising fantasies, stars seem to relish the opportunity to take control of their erotic output. “It’s actually kind of nice to be like, ‘OK, I’ll do this. I’ll do it my way with my creative vision for how I want this to be,’ ” Spiegel says.
“When they see other actors, at first, they want to go see what this is,” Spiegel explains of pitching stars. “They want to watch the trailers; they want to listen to the audios. They just want to see what the response has been in the past, see what the vibe is and if this is something they would consider.”
Beyond her goal of broadening Quinn’s reach thanks to premium voice talent, Spiegel hopes the app can “normalize” sex and desire for women. “Sex is a healthy and happy part of life that doesn’t need to be swept into the dark corner of the internet or left on the cutting room floor,” she says. “It’s a part of life, and it’s part of all the best stories. Normalizing that sex, desire and pleasure isn’t something you have to be ashamed about, especially for women. It has been so helpful in bringing that message to the forefront.”
Spiegel also sees a world in which audio erotica becomes an everyday norm, “making it one of those subscriptions that everyone has, like Netflix and Spotify.”
Quinn’s star collaborations may help challenge some taboos around erotic content, but for now the stars themselves were tight-lipped about their work with the app when contacted by THR.
For now, listeners can be the main characters in their fantasies all thanks to a pair of headphones with maybe a famous voice leading the charge. After all, they are there to please as Blyth teases in his story promo, “Play you something beautiful? Your wish is my command.”
A version of this story appeared in the Dec. 17 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
